70% of doctors said they were getting less of it from patients than when they started practicing. For patients, meantime, the more they reported being treated respectfully and listened to, the more satisfied they were with their physician.

Respect matters. The more respect patients have for their medical providers, the better care they will receive.

Just as important, doctors need to better respect their patients. As shown in the survey, it has a direct correlation with how satisfied they are with their medical care.

In a piece from The Atlantic, physician Ford Vox outlined some of the shenanigans:

Dr. Arthur Derse called me up exclaiming, “Holy mackerel! It’s much worse than it looked in the paper. I’m stunned, absolutely stunned.” Dr. Derse is the Director of Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities a the Medical College of Wisconsin. “When all’s said and done, it’s really the profession of medicine that has the black eye in this case,” he says.

I strongly believe that politics and medicine should have a clear separation. The family physicians affiliated with the University of Wisconsin clearly were sympathetic to the unions, and allowed their political leanings to sway their medical judgment.

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